Social Media Soccer Fans Take Over The Eiffel Tower For A Month

Part of a public relations campaign, launched by Orange, a French carrier, users of social media will be taking over Paris’ Eiffel Tower for one month. As a 2016 UEFA Euro sponsor, the color of the Eiffel Tower’s lights will be selected based on supporting countries’ Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook posts, during the soccer tournament. The way it works is, should Italy and England have a match at some time during the month, fans of either team can express support via social media channels, using recommended UEFA hashtags. Scores regarding posts will be counted up, from one minute past midnight, until the match starts that day. The team with the most posts will get their country’s colors (in lights) flashing on the tower, till midnight.

The UEFA football championships will be held in Paris, from June 10th to July 10th (totaling a full month of social media mayhem), and Orange is also hoping to project any interesting tweets, or other social media posts, on the Eiffel Tower as well, during that time.

The initiative should be a pretty intense one. Over 670 million Twitter posts were tweeted during the 2014 World Cup; which according to the social media giant, was approximately six time more activity, than during the Olympics. Soccer fans are insanely passionate about their sport!

MSN advises PR campaigns that are launched around social media aren’t always successful. One example of this was organized by the European football league itself, UEFA. The organization asked users of Twitter to share graphics that were auto-generated to show support for their favorite 2016 UEFA team. The result? Many internet trolls took a not-so-positive stance during the campaign.

Still, as it relates to the Eiffel Tower social media initiative, Orange notes, it has a solid group of moderators to take on the job, should they be needed; including staff from three PR agencies, and a team of employees, in-house. Posts that are being chosen to be projected onto the tower will be carefully selected by the company, and it has already set up words that will be ‘blacklisted’, and not tallied against a country’s total; so trolls, should beware.

At the end of the day, it seems like everything has been lined up appropriately, so that Eiffel Tower social media campaign will be a positive one, where fans can support their team, in an effort to create a little fun, and healthy competition among spectators of the sport.